Wednesday, October 24, 2007

We recently migrated reporting services from one machine to another. After performing a fairly textbook migration (we migrated the databases, encryption keys, applying service packs etc...), everything SEEMED to be working. But we were getting plagued with one intermittent error that was extremely weird to troubleshoot.

When opening up a report (or drilling in, paging etc...) we would intermittently get a:

An internal error occurred on the report server. See the error log for more details.

Nothing would show up in the Event Log.

If you dig into the reporting services log files (C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.3\Reporting Services\LogFiles...) you eventually find some text that looks like this:

So what happend? The old machine was running on Intel hardware the new one was running on AMD. Specifically an AMD x64 proc that boasts AMD's Cool'n Quiet technology. Essentially this messes with software like Reporting Services that try to get at the system time through the QueryPerformanceCounter() function.

About Me

Tyler Holmes is a Solutions Architect working in Portland, Oregon. He lives mostly in the MS tech stack and is currently treading the waters of Communication/Collaboration and Business Intelligence with off the shelf/open source technologies.